Welcome to Poetry Slammed

Poetry Slammed is the wiki of a group of middle schoolers exploring poetry together---and trying to decide whether or not we like it!  After all, poetry is the misunderstood genre, isn't it?  For the first 12 (or 13, or 14 or 16) years of our lives, we've been beaten over the head with the trivial rhymers and the cute one-timers.  We can write a haiku, but not because we want to.  And to be honest, we've been limericked to death.   

Now, we demand something more from our poets. 

We want passion.  We want emotion.  We want humor and clever word choice.  We want similes and metaphors that don't involve imaginary dinosaurs.  We want a grown up poem or two because we're starting to grow up.  We're making a concious decision to rebel against Shel (Silverstein, that is) and his comical colleagues----not because they stink, but because they're for kids.  And we're not kids.

We're "young adults."  (Impressive, ain't we?)

So what will you find here on Poetry Slammed?  A few things:

1. An ongoing conversation about poetry that we're having with one another using a tool called Voicethread.  Whenever we want to get a bit of inspiration---or some feedback from our peers----we meet around a digital table and reflect with one another.  It's collaboration our way. 
2. A collection of links to interesting poems that we're studying together and that we want to share with each other.  The cool part about our collection is that it is our collection.  We picked these poems because they mean something to us-----not because we found them in our language arts textbooks.
3. A collection of drafts of our own poems.  This wiki is a place where motivated poets can write without being worried about our grades.  We're creating our own pages to house our own poems----some of which we'll share beyond this wiki and others which will die in draft form. 

What you won't find here on Poetry Slammed is our names!  Anonymity is just plain cool.  We'll be famous and you won't have any clue who we are.  So there.

Table of Contents:

Our Ongoing Conversation

Poems that Won't Bore You

Welcome to the Drafthaus